A bidding war has broken out for the memoirs of Amanda Knox - the 24-year-old American student who was cleared of murdering her British housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. A number of US publishers are anxious to get their hands on the book, which is predicted to be one of the biggest selling titles in recent memory.
Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecuto controversially won their appeal against a murder sentence for the killing of Kercher, with the Seattle-born student almost immediately being approached to write and release her memoirs. According to the New York Times, she has been meeting with numerous publishers to discuss the book, with one source telling the newspaper, "Everybody fell in love with her", adding that Knox came across in meetings as "soft-spoken, smart, almost scholarly, naming literary novels that she found moving". Crucially, she is now represented by Robert Barnett - the US lawyer whose literary clients include Tony Blair and President Barack Obama and who secured a reported $12 million for the memoirs of Bill Clinton. One executive involved in the bidding war said, "The book will have very broad resonance.The world has heard from everybody else, but the world has not actually heard from Amanda Knox". One large US publisher disagrees that the memoirs will be a runaway success, describing the deal as a "huge gamble" and therefore not taking part in the bidding war.
Publisher John Blake felt Knox's book would be "a very interesting book", but suggested it wouldn't do as well in the UK as it surely will in the US, saying, "Most British people, if you asked, would say [Amanda Knox] is very lucky not to still be in prison, whereas in America she's seen as someone who was very badly treated".